whw 0041

IS WESTERN CIVILIZATION THE ROUTE

• TO HUMAN WELFARE?

Even since President Truman’s “Point Four” programme was promulgated in 1949, the “develop-

ment” and “modernization” of the non-European

world has been proolaimed by political and intellectual

leaders as the ultimate goal of policy and the supreme

good. Countless books, journals and seminars all over the world have. dealt with the so-called “moderniza-

‘·tion” of this or that country, almost ~thout exception,

praising this cultural and social upheaval as

in the interests for the “progress” of mankind. All

traditional values and institutions must, according

to this view, b~ willingly sacrificed ‘at the altar of the goddess of “change” and the faster things change,

the better. This dogma ofUProgress” first took shape

during the so-called “Age of Englightenment” led by

Voltaire which considered religion in general and the I I

Christian churches in particular, responsible for all

the ills of man. Religion Was equated with superstition

and mythology, bigotry, fanaticism and tyranny. The

world, shorn of religious bigotry, they’ claimed, would henceforth be freed from the evils of persecution,

torture and wars as relics of the barbaric past and all human beings would then live together in a beautiful fratenity. What gave the goddess of Change unchalleng-

ed mastery over the world was the theory of mechanical

evolutionary progress, first applied to biology by Charles Darwin, to economics by Karl Marx, to